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Bitcoin breaks $200

coinbase.com

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Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#131

Post by gbog »

TomGullen wrote: post #122
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #72

Who wants to talk about china? Over the last few days the volume of transactions on btcchina has doubled. Gov run chinese media outlets have been surprisingly positive about btc. What is going on? One of the potential uses of btc is capital flight, and that is something that china has been incredibly strict about with their capital controls. Why aren't they clamping down? edit: some commentary from someone in china f…

I'd like to see Chinese wholesalers and manufacturers accepting Bitcoin for orders as I think this would be a huge positive indicator for Bitcoin. I think the incentive is there, cut out the middle men (banks) who charge exorbitant exchange rate and transfer fees and the customer/business can both save. This would possibly be the most meaningful utility for Bitcoin to date if it happens. It's a pretty cutthroat and c…

Individual resellers on Taobao don't play on small margins but on specialization and service. They sure compete on price but also on reputation, maybe even more.

So if clients would like to pay in btc, I see them allowing it easily and accepting the risk. However I don't see the lambda Chinese girl paying her purple furr stocks in btc.

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#132

Post by fleitz »

tedunangst wrote: post #82
fleitz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various banks have programs to collateralize chinese assets and offer a loan based on those assets. eg. You collateralize $10 million in Chinese assets, you get a $8 million dollar loan from a bank branch in another jurisdiction. Capital controls have already essentially be thwarted by the market, the second item is that BTC actually provides a great public ledger for amounts that would be unfeasible for the usual co…

Do loans like that really defeat capital controls? The "owner" of the money has changed, but the location hasn't. The bank giving you the loan is playing a very long game, because they still can't move the collateral out. Right, wrong?

Not really, as soon as the loan is repaid the bank is whole. The loan originates in a non-Chinese country so when the loan is extinguished the bank has the value of the loan plus interest.

Only if the loan defaults does the bank run any risk of having capital trapped in China. Worst comes to worst they use the capital in China to originate more loans in China. Any bank offering this service has a presence in China so it's not a big deal anyway.

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#133

Post by olalonde »

theklub wrote: post #81

I'm afraid that when bitcoin becomes more mainstream there is going to be serious amounts of fraud and scamming.

Bitcoin can be seen as a sort of digital gold. Credit cards / Paypal / etc. could work exactly the same but be backed by Bitcoins instead of USD. See http://undergroundeconomist.com/post/36076277512

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#134

Post by lmm »

marcell wrote: post #57
betterunix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, there is no particular technical or legal feature of Bitcoin to differentiate it from another system. Bitcoin just happens to be the most popular and receive the most press. If you cannot identify a particular, distinguishing feature of Bitcoin that accounts for its popularity, why should we believe that this is not a bubble?

I could make teddit.com, a reddit clone by copy & pasting their entire git repository at https://github.com/reddit/reddit . But I doubt anyone would use it, because of network effects. The same thing applies to bitcoin.

Your point is undermined by the fact that reddit hasn't lived up to its hype (and I believe its estimated valuation has gone down lately). Myspace was supposed to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a few years ago. A large current userbase does not a stable value make.

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#135

Post by gwern »

TylerE wrote: post #124
Phlarp wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet I doubt any of these saw 40x YoY increases topping out at a $2.5 billion valuation.

Webvan got to something like $1.5b Broadcast.com sold to Yahoo for $5.7b

> Broadcast.com sold to Yahoo for $5.7b

Smells like success, not failure.

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#136

Post by gwern »

Phlarp wrote: post #110
TylerE wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What happens when the founders who mined hundreds of thousands of coins in the early days cash out?

Go look at the top 250 addresses, a _majority_ of them have never been spent from. There isn't any conclusive proof that the #1 address (111,111 BTC) belongs to DPR, but it is clearly linked to SR in one way or another. I'd be willing to bet a solid amount of my own holdings that those coins are effectively "dead" (private key lost) along with a good portion of the rest of the addresses that haven't been touched sinc…

> There isn't any conclusive proof that the #1 address (111,111 BTC) belongs to DPR, but it is clearly linked to SR in one way or another.

It's been linked to Ross/altoid's Bitcointalk posts, and has a sum consistent with the first year of SR commissions. That's all as conclusive evidence as anyone needs for it.

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#137

Post by Phlarp »

jaekwon wrote: post #123
Phlarp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>cannot be confiscated. Several internet drug lords would beg to differ.

Which ones? DPR's personal wallet is still intact.

That completely depends on how they were stored. If the FBI has his encrypted wallet file and DPR has the password to access those keys then the coins are effectively dead don't you think?

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#138

Post by Phlarp »

sktrdie wrote: post #129
Phlarp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet theory is that a good amount of the early coins are effectively "dead" with either the keys lost, brain wallets forgotten or the back-up USB keys long since formatted (or you know, you got arrested and the encrypted wallet is seized as evidence and revealing the key or otherwise moving the coins would basically be an admission of guilt) It's easy to set up triple redundant cold storage and promptly place multi…

Those are all risks that come with using Bitcoin. I'm sure with time we'll see lots of improvements. For now a good way to store coins is by using paper wallets: http://www.bitaddress.org/ -you can print them yourself using any printer. Some say your keys shouldn't even be on any computer until you're ready to use them. But for the rest Bitcoin is like cash. You lose the key you lose the cash.

Most times when one person "loses" cash another person "finds" it, leaving the money supply unchanged. When a private key is lost all the coins in that wallet are lost effectively forever. If this happens with large accounts the potential for it to effect the overall economy cannot be ignored.

Re: Bitcoin breaks $200

#140

Post by TylerE »

gwern wrote: post #135
TylerE wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webvan got to something like $1.5b Broadcast.com sold to Yahoo for $5.7b

> Broadcast.com sold to Yahoo for $5.7b Smells like success, not failure.

Not really. Basically everything that was Broadcast.com was shutdown within 8 years. So they basically paid $5b+ to run a service that lost money every year for a few years until they finally just quietly dissolved it.

I mean, the broadcast.com guys made out like bandits, the buyers, not so much.

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